Workroom Conversation Making Kin series
Hosted by MACities at Central St Martins UAL, this series of talks will explore how we can ‘make worlds’ together with the human and the more-than-human and how through cultural practices of making kin we can propose new narratives for our built infrastructures.
Each session opens with a guest speaker, either a practitioner or thinker, sharing their research and practice, exploring how we use acts of worlding to highlight, advance and re-address the power balance towards non-dominant narratives voices.
After the presentation the group may discuss the research covered and how the guests’ ideas around the topic feed into a broader discourse around world-building as a necessary practice for making and changing culture.
10th April 2024 – 6-7pm
Making Kin
Lou-Atessa Marcellin, Seth Scafe-Smith (RESOLVE), Jamie Hignett (Unit 38), Markas Fortunatas Klisius and Rebecca Sainsot-Reynolds
The talk will be looking at processes of making with, making for each other and crafting ‘nameless relations’ through intimacy; ones that can only be acquired through time. It will approach this through proposing different terminologies as ways to make kin rather than providing definitive guidelines and answers. Marcellin will be joined by guests Seth Scafe-Smith (RESOLVE), Jamie Hignet (Unit 38), Markas Fortunatas Klisius and Rebecca Sainsot-Reynolds who will share personal experience of crafting kinship through their practice.
1st May 2024 – 6-7pm
Parasitic practices: The case of Land Rights Struggle in al-Araqib, Naqab Desert, Israel/Palestine
Ariel Caine
The parasite, traditionally associated with harm and exploitation, a threat to a host body, can also be viewed differently, as a force that exposes vulnerabilities. Drawing on his work at Forensic Architecture, Caine wishes to discuss the relationship between the idea of the parasite and activist practices as they engage within the realm of juridical processes and counter dominant media practice. Caine will focus on a critical exploration of indigenous land rights struggle in the Naqab desert in the south of present-day Israel with particular emphasis on the case of the village of al-Araqib. By weaving the parasite metaphor into this context, Caine hopes to invite reflection on the transformative potentials and difficulties of these legal, artistic and activist struggles.
29th May 2024 – 6-7pm
Relation(ality) and Other Tellings
Margarida Waco
In this offering, architect Margarida Waco opens up a space for collective reflections on the languages and grammar we might take upon us in our aspirations, dreams, and desires to create a world rooted in reciprocal relations. Dedicated to a political analysis of the infrastructures that shape our existence as relatives distant and far, she calls upon possibility-making and transformation in the ruins of extractive capitalism.
12th June 2024 – 6-7pm
Living With Trees: three arboreal orientations
John Bingham-Hall
How can we humans and the trees be each other’s parasites? What visions of more-than-human public life are wrapped up in the ways we parasite one another’s structures? Bingham-Hall will consider these questions through three arboreal orientations, three ways that we can angle towards trees, and vice versa. Trees as weeds, trees as infrastructures of human survival, and trees as architectures for queer encounters. As preparation for the talk, you are invited to listen to treesarefags.euas you walk through the park, in the woods, or even down the street.